Monday, November 3, 2008

We can hear them now

By now we have >95% of all the polling data we're going to have before Tuesday. Fivethiryeight.com has a very interesting graph of where the various national trackers have the race. In yellow are pollsters who include cell-phone-only surveys, while gray has landline-only samples. Striking:

If the cell phone only crowd is being weighted properly, then it looks like Obama is going to win the popular vote by about 10 points, which would probably put him close to 400 electoral votes -- it would mean that pretty much every single swing state went his way, including some that aren't really thought of as swing states, like Indiana, Montana, and North Dakota (hell, maybe even Arizona).

Of course, there could be regional bias to these data. Perhaps, the cell-phone-only crowd tends to live in big coastal cities, so what they're doing is not relevant to, say, Montana. But Florida has a lot of big coastal cities. Ohio has big cities. North Carolina has a lot of young folk in cities.

Regardless of where these voters are and how it affects the electoral map, if Obama succeeds in beating McCain by >10 points and breaks the 55% popular vote barrier, he will be the first non-incumbent president to do so since FDR.